National News

A Virginia restaurant operator has agreed to pay $40,000 to resolve a lawsuit that claims its employees routinely harassed a gay server with homophobic epithets and taunted him about his sexuality, according to Washington’s Top News.

In the days following the Dayton, Ohio mass shooting on August 4, many news outlets said that among the victims of shooter Connor Betts, 24, was his sibling, identified in reports as Betts’ sister, Megan Betts, 22, allegedly the first victim in the shooting.

Gavin Grimm is 20 now, but he has been fighting ongoing high school bathroom restrictions on trans students in Virginia.

Grimm returned to Norfolk Federal Court for a summary hearing on July 23, four years after he first petitioned the courts over using the boys bathroom in 2015, when he was a high school sophomore who had recently transitioned. He was banned from using the boys bathrooms post-transition. Grimm graduated in 2017.

To address the ongoing issue of violence against Black LGBTQ people, the national NAACP convention in Detroit hosted two town-hall meetings: “Gender Justice Matters Fireside Chat” and “The State of LGBTQ People of Color in America” on July 21 and July 23 respectively.

Since May, a Black transgender woman and three gay Black men have been killed in Detroit. Two more Black gay men have been shot and wounded according to the Detroit Free Press.

The message at both events was that while Stonewall 50 may be a celebration for some, it is also a stark reminder that Black LGBTQ people are still very much at risk in their communities, and homophobia and transphobia are still a present danger.

On July 12, magazine, The New Republic, published an essay on presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg using gay tropes to argue against his presidency.

In the piece titled “My Mayor Pete Problem,” Dale Peck referred to Buttigieg, who is affectionately known as “Mayor Pete,” as “Mary Pete.” Peck also referred to Buttigieg as a “gay Uncle Tom.” In the essay Peck claimed that Buttigieg, a Rhodes scholar and an Afghanistan vet, would be a disaster as president, cheating on his husband, searching for the sex he hadn’t had as a closeted adolescent.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, more commonly called GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”), has launched its 11th National School Climate Survey in its primary mission to ensure safe schools for LGBTQ students.

While the amount of non-LGBTQ adults ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ comfortable with the gay community has stabilized after a large dip last year, more Americans ages 18-34 are less comfortable with queer people, a new study found.

The fifth-annual Accelerating Acceptance Index, a national survey of 1,970 United States adults’ attitudes toward LGBTQ people, was released June 24. It was run by marketing research group The Harris Poll alongside LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD. Responses were gathered online Jan. 8-11.